‘catch Us If You Can’: House And Senate Will Race Each Other To Pass Trump Agenda

After spending weeks debating whether to pass President-elect Donald Trump's agenda in one big bill or split it in two, the House and Senate made their decision clear Thursday: both.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and other top leaders recommitted to passing border, tax and energy policies in "one, big beautiful bill" — as Trump himself has called for — while senators said they planned to continue down a two-bill track, which they said had the potential to deliver much quicker legislative victories to the incoming president.

In essence, the two chambers would race each other to see who could show quicker progress.

”I'd say, catch us if you can,” House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) said.

Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) clapped back at that suggestion: “Yeah, he’s very slow. He’s very slow.”

Under the strategy discussed in a closed-door lunch on Thursday, Senate Republicans led by Graham would move forward with drafting their own, two-bill-oriented budget — even if it just ends up being a back-up plan in the event the House can’t act quickly.

"We are proceeding in a way that it keeps optionality,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in an interview. “Obviously in the end, we want to get a result and we want to walk closely with our House counterparts … but we've got some folks who are itching to go and, I think, a good proposal out there."

The Senate’s decision not to simply defer to the House approach is driven by deep skepticism among Republican senators that the House GOP will be able to unite with its ultra-slim majority behind a sprawling bill that also includes a major tax overhaul.

“I understand what the House is saying. I don't quite follow the logic,” Graham said.

But Johnson and House Republicans are vowing that they will be able to pass their own budget blueprint by the end of February that will tee up border, energy and tax policy together.

Johnson told reporters Thursday afternoon that he’s still working with the Senate to properly “sequence” the massive effort. He said he had spoken with Trump, Thune and incoming Vice President JD Vance at former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral earlier in the day about the matter.

It wasn’t immediately clear just how long Senate Republicans would be willing to wait before advancing their own blueprint, or whether they would instead sit back ready to move quickly if Johnson gets bogged down with House infighting. It’s also undetermined, Thune said, whether the Senate's plan would come to the floor while the House continues to work.

Johnson has significant hurdles to overcome within his own conference, starting with the price tag of the planned megabill. Conservative hard-liners want the bill to be deficit-neutral, but the difficulty of finding trillions of dollars is raising fears it could implode under its own weight in the coming months.

Johnson said a cost-neutral bill is “one of the things that we're trying to ensure” but added that he “can't commit to any final proposition in the moment” as the package is assembled.

The Senate’s parallel track got a seeming endorsement from Thune after a closed-door meeting with President-elect Donald Trump Wednesday night: “Obviously we want to give the House as much space as possible,” he told reporters. “But we are prepared to move here as well."

There is dissent inside the Senate GOP ranks about trying to move on parallel tracks rather than working together with the House on a unified blueprint.

“That is a recipe for failure,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who noted that both chambers have to pass an identical budget resolution to proceed with either strategy. “I'm for accomplishing our goal, and we're not even working on it right now. We're just spinning our wheels.”

“There is a little bit of this game of chicken,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) added. “But I said to my leadership we need to get moving. I don’t know how much value there is in this extended standoff.”

Meanwhile, Arrington left open the possibility that the House could pivot to a two-bill approach, saying “there's a chance that the president gets into office and realizes that he's going to need some resources and tools on the border to help him fulfill his commitment to the American people.”

“And if he needs those resources at any time, we make that shift to support it,” the House Budget chair added.

Ursula Perano, Nicholas Wu and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.